


friends with the ghosts in my head

by tentaclemonster



Category: Meddling Kids - Edgar Cantero
Genre: Gen, Light Angst, M/M, Mindfuck, Post-Canon, Unrequited Nate Rogers/Mental Stability
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-01
Updated: 2020-02-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:00:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22515133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tentaclemonster/pseuds/tentaclemonster
Summary: Nate goes a month without seeing Peter before he shows back up again.
Relationships: Nate Rogers/Peter Manner
Kudos: 11





	friends with the ghosts in my head

It’s cruel in a way that Nate is given a whole month of peace before his whole world comes crashing down again.

A whole month of rebuilding his sanity and of learning to believe that he is sane again, that he can be. 

A whole month of accepting that he isn’t powerless, isn’t pathetic, isn’t just some guy in a mental asylum who spends his nights staring blankly up at the ceiling swallowing down the pervasive fear that he will never get over his childhood trauma like it’s vomit that’s coming up after a depression binge of cookies and cola.

A whole month of getting to know (and to befriend) Ashen Fox and getting over the inherent weirdness of talking to a dog that could talk  _ back _ and who is teaching him how to be a sorcerer to boot.

And, somehow most significantly, a whole month without Peter.

Nate gets one month without seeing his dead childhood friend walking and talking like he never died to begin with, one month feeling like he’s finally got some closure with regards to Peter Manner and everything he felt for him both in life and after death, one month of pretending he doesn’t (kindasortamaybe)  _ miss _ the guy even if his hallucination wasn’t the real Peter after all.

Nate gets a month free of Peter before, just as easily as he had disappeared from Nate’s life a month before, Peter comes back again.

It happens on a Friday night. 

The girls are in San Francisco by then and have been for three weeks,  _ one _ week being as long as either Andy or Kerri felt like they could stand destressing at Aunt Margo’s house before the destressing turned into stressing  _ out _ and cabin fever got to them. 

Nate, truthfully, hadn’t been all that sorry to see them go. He’d been feeling a little feverish himself after a week under one roof with the girls, though not the kind of feverish that makes you want to leave a place that’s only charming for a short duration but the kind that comes over you when you’ve had unexpected company drop by right before you were about to make lunch and hours later find yourself still starving and frequently shooting looks at the clock because your company is still chatting and seems to have no plans of leaving any time soon.

Nate’s hunger just hadn’t been so much for food as it was learning about magic, something he couldn’t do much of with his cousin and her new girlfriend underfoot when both of them wanted to put all things fantastical firmly in the past and move on with their lives. 

Also, Nate would be lying if he said that being able to retire from his starring role in the Andy/Kerri Love Story of the Century as  _ giant third wheel number one _ wasn’t a part of his relief at finally kissing them goodbye at the door and leaving him and Ashen Fox in his furry Tim form alone at last. 

It was different when he’d had Peter (or his hallucination of Peter, at least) who only he could see, who was his in a way that was something (but not really) like how Andy was Kerri’s, who granted him some camaraderie and company of his own when Andy and Kerri were first canoodling about. 

Nate hadn’t felt like such a third wheel then because, even if he was the only one who knew it, he wasn’t a third wheel at all. He was part of a foursome who had his own twosome with Peter while Andy had her twosome with Kerri. With Peter gone and him not being able to hold a conversation with Ashen Fox all that often without worrying about the girls either hearing the dog talk back and freaking out or – worse still – not hearing Ashen Fox at all but thinking Nate was having talks with a dog who they didn’t hear talking  _ back _ and was going crazy again...well, the loneliness was a little more punctuated and a little harder to bare. 

Even in the nuthouse he was never so alone, he had the other patients (and Peter) who were always happy to talk and didn’t play favorites about who they wanted to listen.

So while Nate loves both Andy and Kerri probably more than he loves any other living people on the planet, he’d been as happy to see them on their way as they were to leave. He gets a month of basking contently in that happiness and then he gets doused with a metaphorical bucket of ice and impaled with an equally figurative ice  _ pick _ right in the side of his head.

It’s Friday night and Nate is a picture of bad posture that worried mothers everywhere would cringe away from like Bella Lugosi from a cross and use as an example to scare their children into sitting up straight at all times lest they want to turn into the Hunchback of Notre Dame by the time they’re thirty. 

He’s slumped over his desk, pouring over a book titled  _ Folk Magickes of the Later 16 _ _ th _ _ Century _ which was written in the 18 th century and has the fragile, brittle, look-at-them-and-they’ll-fall-apart pages to prove it. He’d bought the book at, of all places, a thrift store or as Ashen Fox calls them: Walmarts for sorcerers who need to save a buck and can’t stand the smell of patchouli.

Ashen Fox, at that moment, is not in the room with Nate. 

Ashen Fox is curled up on the couch in the living room with a jumbo size bone in his mouth (bought at an actual Walmart) and some oldies network playing on the TV in front of him where he’d politely asked Nate to set the channel and then brushed off Nate’s question about whether he was able to work the remote if he wanted to change it to something else.

_ “I won’t need to change it,” Ashen Fox said in a voice filled with solemnity and wisdom. “There’s a Family Feud marathon going until 4am.” _

So as far as Nate knows, he’s alone in his room with just his book for company which is why no one can blame him for making like a startled rabbit and freezing wide-eyed and still as a prey animal the second he feels a soft breeze of warm, human breath right at his ear that’s followed by a firm hand landing on his shoulder and the immediate knowledge that comes with it that someone – someone who should  _ not _ be there, who should not be there at  _ all _ – is reading over his shoulder like every nosy teacher Nate has ever had from Kindergarten on up.

The breathing continues for one exhale, two, and then like the pin being pulled from a grenade

“Whatcha reading, Nate?” Peter asks. 

And if Peter’s voice is a grenade, then Nate’s reaction to it is a nuclear bomb. 

He shrieks the sound of a dog being killed in a horror movie, that horrible cut off yelp-turned-whimper that the idiot stars of the flick follow to their all too predictable deaths in the woods, and he jumps out of his seat so violently that he sends it crashing back to the other side of the wall in his haste to get out of it and spin around to see the owner of that voice, to see the person whose voice he thought he’d never hear again, to see--

Peter who is now across the room himself just like the chair, but unlike that overturned piece of furniture that’s leaning a gentle breeze away from falling against Nate’s closed window, Peter is now in Nate’s bed lounging back as relaxedly as he would on a floatie at the pool. 

His arms are crossed behind his head which rests on Nate’s pillow, his ankles crossed at the foot of the bed with barely any space left between his feet and the footboard. He wears the same letter jacket and jeans he did the last time Nate saw ( _ hallucinated _ ) him a month before, before he disappeared into thin air and the only Peter left was the dead one – the real one – but this Peter isn’t that. 

This Peter looks the same as Nate’s hallucination always did: strong with a presence that draws all the air in the room into his space, handsome as any movie star ought to be, and – more striking than anything – completely and utterly alive.

And while Nate looks at Peter the way a camper would look at a bear that just popped its head through the opening of their tent, Peter looks back at Nate with nothing but impassivity and amusement on his face. 

That makes one of them, at least. 

Nate is not amused at all.

Nate’s heart is thudding in his chest like rocks falling down a cliff and he wonders frantically if he’s asleep right now, if he’s in a nightmare and that in just a second he’ll wake up to find that he passed out while reading about folk magic, his head pillowed on his old book that’s now been ruined by the drool that leaked out of him while he slept, words smeared to a puddle of spit and ink that tracked across his cheek like he used coal for blush and had no clue how to blend it in.

The second passes. 

Nate does not wake up.

Peter wiggles his eyebrows and gives Nate a winning, pearl white smile. “Did you miss me, Nate?”

Nate stares at him agog, aghast, and any other words that start with ag-- that mean  _ how the fuck is this happening again? _

Peter goes on, unconcerned, “Because the truth, man? I missed you.”

“You left,” is what comes out of Nate. His mouth is dry and the words are croaked like a frog. Or like Frog _ ger _ . Nate feels pretty damn flattened out.

Peter’s smile falters. Dims down a shade like a touch lamp in reverse. “Uh...yeah. That wasn’t great of me, I know, but---”

“You  _ left _ ,” Nate says again, louder. Voice stronger, a thread of panic working through it. He only realizes how accusatory he sounds after he’s already said it, but realization does nothing to stop the flow of words coming out of him. “You left because your weren’t  _ real _ . You left because the real Peter showed up and then died  _ again _ . You’re not – I’m not – I shouldn’t be  _ seeing _ you. I  _ undid _ all of that. I fixed it. I got  _ rid _ of you.”

“Oh, Nate.” The look Peter shoots him is almost pitying. “Buddy. You’re never gonna get rid of me.”

“ _ Why the fuck are you here, Peter?” _ Nate shouts right before his body weight staggers back into his desk, the only thing there supporting him and keeping him from landing in a heap on the floor.

In the back of his mind, Nate is aware that Ashen Fox is in the house and could hear him yelling at any time and that – in all likelihood – he wouldn’t hear (much less see) Peter talking back. 

In the front of his mind, Nate is overwhelmed by the knowledge that something – somewhere, somehow – has gone horribly, horribly wrong and he hasn’t got a clue what it is much less how to fix it.

Peter sits up in the bed, back to the headboard, and crosses his legs beneath himself. 

“You see, it’s like chicken pox,” Peter says in a voice nostalgically reminiscent of when they were kids and he was patiently helping Nate with his math homework. “You remember getting chicken pox, right, man?”

Nate does remember. He remembers screaming into his pillow to stop himself from scratching. He remembers that Peter is the one who gave it to him in the first place (and to Andy and Kerri too) after he somehow got it from Joey Krantz. He remembers being secretly glad about all of them getting it at the same time because it meant he wouldn’t have to spend his summer holed up in his room alone. He remembers that later when he and Peter were strong-armed into taking an oatmeal bath together while Andy and Kerri had another bath all for them, it was the first and last time he ever saw Peter totally naked – a fact that Nate would lament on through the entirety of his adolescence, not that he ever told anyone that or likely ever will.

He remembers, he’s just not sure what it has to do with anything  _ now _ . 

His confusion must show, because Peter goes on without bothering to wait for him to reply.

“See, with chicken pox, you catch a bug and it itches at you for awhile. You claw your skin until it’s no better than raw meat. You find ways to ignore the itch, slather yourself in calamine lotion and tell yourself you’re not feeling what you know you’re feeling, and eventually your little red bumps go away and you think you’re fit to go out and play with the other kids again – but the funny thing is, Nate, the funny thing is---”

And here Peter grins with absolute shit-eating delight.

“The funny thing  _ is _ , my old buddy old pal, is that chicken pox never actually goes away. That fucker is always inside of you – once you got  _ it _ , it’s got  _ you _ – and someday when you’re old and grey and think life can’t get worse than it already is, you’ve got a chance of winning one of life’s worst lottos because that little bug that gave you the bumpies as a kid that you forgot about for the next fifty years can come back and give you the kind of hurt that aches all night and never goes away.”

Oh.

Well, that’s just – 

Nate shuts his eyes tight so he can stop seeing the way the room is suddenly spinning and tells himself not to puke. He doesn’t feel like cleaning vomit out of carpet tonight or any night ever.

A half a minute passes. Nate keeps breathing in and out through his nose with all the concentration of a pregnant woman doing lamaze.

Peter pipes up, “I’m the bug in this scenario, by the way.”

“Yeah,” Nate says faintly. “Yeah, I got that part.”

Then, even though he doesn’t want to, Nate opens his eyes. 

Peter’s elbow is resting on his knee now and his chin rests propped up on his fist. He watches Nate with open curiosity. The kind of curiosity Nate would have killed to have Peter look at him with back when they were kids (and Peter was still alive, still the real Peter, not this – this –  _ projection _ ).

“Why now?” he asks. Out of all the question he could ask, this is the one Nate settles on. “Why show up now after a month?”

“Like I said,” Peter says with a shrug. “I missed you.”

Nate makes a small noise of disbelief. “You’re not real, Peter. You’re – I don’t know what you are – but you’re not real. You don’t have the capacity to miss anyone or anything. You don’t have  _ feelings _ , for fuck’s sake!”

“Oh, and you’re the authority for defining what reality is now, are you, Nate?” Peter rolls his eyes dramatically. “Let’s make a list, shall we? You’re living with a talking dog who’s teaching you how to bend the laws of reality by mixing up shit you’ve got growing in the garden and reading out loud from some dusty old books you got at a garage sale. You’ve met an evil wizard who lived for hundreds of years and didn’t look it one bit and that’s before we even get into the tits and pussy he probably grew after sacrificing some goats under the full moon. You’ve seen  _ monsters _ – actual, certifiable monsters, not just greedy old guys wearing their Halloween masks in July to commit tax evasion. Do I need to keep going? When the fuck are you going to learn that reality isn’t as cut and dry as you’re making it out to be?”

Nate absolutely refuses to admit to Peter that he has a point. 

Aloud, at least.

Privately, though…

“Besides,” Peter goes on. “It’s not just that I missed you, you know? You missed me, too.”

Nate blanches at that. “ _ What _ ?”

On the bed, Peter honest to god  _ preens _ . “How many times did you think to yourself you wished I were there when Butch and Sundance were busy making moon eyes and thinking of excuses to give you so they could sneak upstairs to scissor each other until they passed out?”

Heat crawls up Nate’s face from chin to cheek. Humiliation settles like a stone in his throat.

Maybe Peter notices his flush, maybe he doesn’t, but he’s unrelenting all the same.

“How many times did you lay here in this –“ Peter pats the mattress with his hand. “-- very bed and think to yourself how  _ quiet _ it is at night and how you sure wished you still had your good friend Peter there to talk to you until you fell asleep like I did back in the loony bin? How many times have you been on a walk or reading one of your, I’m sure, very fascinating books about what the fuck ever and wished I were there to break up the bore? How many times have you thought of me since I left, Nate, because you want to know another funny thing?”

Nate doesn’t want to know – he really, really doesn’t – but he also doesn’t think that what he wants really matters as much as he wishes it did. 

Peter evidently agrees.

“The funny thing is that you’ve realized that you can make all sorts of shit happen by just saying the right words out loud but you haven’t clued in to the fact that if you wish for something hard enough, often enough, that it’s just as good as reading Latin from some old witch’s diary and making frogs rain from the sky.” 

Realization crawls up Nate’s mind like the creeping vines of poison ivy. 

“Are you telling me I  _ wished _ you into being here?” he demands.

“Well, I mean, I’d like to think of it more as a team effort, but yeah. I’m guessing Toto downstairs hasn’t gotten to the  _ thoughts are power _ part of your education yet, huh?”

Nate’s brain is racing, thinking. 

Thinking, thinking, thinking.

“Wait,” he says, staring at Peter dead-on. “If I wished you here, can’t I just wish you away again?”

“I don’t know, can you?” Peter asks blithely. “And uh, more than that, Nate, do you actually want to?”

Nate opens his mouth to say  _ yes of course I fucking want to _ but the words get lost somewhere between his throat and the tip of his tongue. 

He thinks about all the times he  _ has _ thought about Peter, all the times he’s made himself think of Peter’s voice and what Peter would say with it in his head during those monotonous stretches of time that seem to be happening every day now. The sarcasm and bullshitting that had driven Nate nuts before but that he’d felt the absence of keenly as soon as it was gone. The fact that after a few weeks he’d actually had to make an  _ effort _ to remember what Peter’s voice sounded like and felt on the verge of a panic attack when he did remember and still couldn’t be sure if his memory was right.

Nate thinks and Peter smirks knowingly like he can read Nate’s mind. 

Peter sits back against the headboard again and uncrosses his legs, stretching them out with a satisfied sigh. He interlaces his hands together low on his stomach and looks a perfect picture of a cat who got the canary.

“That’s great, Nate. Absolutely grand,” Peter says, even though Nate hasn’t said – much less agreed to – anything. “You won’t regret having me here. It’s never as much fun going it alone as it is with a friend, anyway.”

Somehow Nate doubts that he won’t have any regrets about this. He doubts it very much indeed.


End file.
